CFA - Chartered Financial Analyst.
The degree provides you with more knowledge than you need to be an average employee in the finance industry. It is spread across 3 levels and has 10 subjects in the first 2 levels and 7 subjects in the last, with Portfolio Management having a weightage of approximately 45% of the paper. By doing this, your brain is able to develop logical, critical, and structured thinking abilities. It forces us to use logical thinking to pass all 3 levels, increasing our brain power.
MBA in Finance - This master's degree comprises 4 semesters spread across 2 years. Its portion is similar to the CFAs portion but the amount of knowledge gained through subjects is less compared to CFA.
Coming to why Investment Banks prefer MBAs over CFAs
Let me put it forward in a simple way. Humans are social creatures and their ability to adapt to the people they are surrounded by is enormous. A person is likely to grow more by learning from the people around them along with textbook knowledge according to IBs. People with too much textbook knowledge can become intelligent, but they have very little chance of beating people with a combination of both. People who are doing MBA in Finance have polished their logical and critical thinking abilities for their entrance exams, they have gained more knowledge than required to excel in a Finance job profile, they have polished pr developed their communication skills by being in a competitive environment and they have learned corporate negotiations and many more things. By just sitting in a room and studying for the CFA exam, an individual has not accomplished all of these things.
My opinion is that CFA + MBA is the best combination. CFA gives you great knowledge and will increase your brain power. Good brain power will increase your chances of gaining a high score in your competitive or GMAT exams, which will enable you to get admission to an excellent and renowned university or college. It makes sense that by doing CFA, you should have knowledge about the MBAs curriculum so that when you go to an MBA college or university, you can concentrate on those things that you were unable to improve while doing CFA, but that are crucial for getting into an IB.
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